Organizing a Wartime Shipyard: The Union Struggle for a Closed Shop at West Coast Shipbuilders Limited 1941–44
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During World War II thousands of workers entered the employ of wartime shipyards in British Columbia. Most Vancouver-area shipyards, following general practice in the United States along the Pacific Coast, operated on the basis of a closed shop, whereby membership was required in recognized labour unions holding agreements with the companies. Management at one shipyard, West Coast Shipbuilders Company Limited, however, bucked this trend and maintained an open shop in the face of growing pressure by the unions, in particular the marine boilermakers, to have a closed one. William McLaren, the main antagonist, reflected enduring older values among some employers in antithesis to labour-management cooperation prevalent in the United States and Canada in support of war production. Though the matter went to conciliation, the drawbacks of a legal approach were readily apparent when a board turned down labour’s request, and negotiations assisted by a judge resulted in adoption of a lesser maintenance of membership clause instead of the closed shop. Worker militancy and aggressive organizing, in the end, could not deliver the closed shop at West Coast Shipbuilders before war contracts concluded and shipbuilding contracted in the province. Taking a local, regional, and industry-specific perspective, this study argues that the union struggle for recognition and accommodation from employers in wartime Canada faltered in the case of obtaining a closed shop at this British Columbia wartime shipyard. Resume Pendant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale, des milliers de travailleurs ont ete employes dans les chantiers navals en Colombie-Britannique. La plupart des chantiers navals dans la region de Vancouver, en suivant la pratique generale aux Etats-Unis tout au long de la cote du Pacifique, fonctionnaient a titre d’ateliers fermes, dans lesquels l’adhesion aux syndicats reconnus qui detenaient des ententes avec les entreprises etait obligatoire. La gestion a un chantier naval, West Coast Shipbuilders Company Limited, toutefois, a agi a contre-courant et a maintenu un atelier ouvert face a la pression croissante des syndicats, en particulier, les fabricants de chaudieres marines, pour en avoir un ferme. William McLaren, l’antagoniste principal, refletait des valeurs plus anciennes et durables parmi certains employeurs par opposition a la collaboration ouvriere patronale courante aux Etats-Unis et au Canada a l’appui de la production pour la guerre. Bien que l’affaire ait passe a la conciliation, les inconvenients d’une approche juridique etaient tres apparents quand une commission avait refuse la demande des syndicats, et les negociations assistees d’un juge avait donne lieu a l’adoption du maintien moindre d’une clause d’adhesion au lieu d’un atelier ferme. La militance des travailleurs et l’organisation agressive, au bout du compte, n’avait pas delivre l’atelier ferme aux chantiers navals de West Coast avant la fin des contrats pour la guerre et l’installation des chantiers navals dans la province. En prenant perspective locale, regionale et axee sur l’industrie, cette etude met en evidence l’argument que la lutte des syndicats pour la reconnaissance et l’accommodation des employeurs pendant la guerre au Canada a chancele dans le cas de l’obtention d’un atelier ferme a ces chantiers navals de Colombie-Britannique.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".